There’s a C.S. Lewis quote I’ve been known to use as justification for my reading choices: “A children’s story which is only enjoyed by children is a bad children’s story.” I stand by this entirely, and it explains why our home-ed shelves hold Dickens and Enid Blyton in the same row, why we’ll read Wilbur Smith one term and Lewis Carroll the next, and why I have never once read a book aloud to my children that I found genuinely boring. Life is too short and the homeschool day is long enough.
The thing about reading is that it can’t really be taught as a subject and expected to stick. You can teach decoding. You can teach phonics and comprehension and inference. But the love of reading — the kind that means a child disappears into a book on a Saturday morning without being asked — that isn’t taught. It’s caught. And what they catch it from is watching you do it, having books available, and never once being made to feel that reading is something happening to them rather than for them.
We read aloud every day. It’s not negotiable in the same way lunch isn’t negotiable — it just happens. Some days it’s three chapters of whatever novel we’re halfway through; some days it’s a magazine article someone found interesting; some days it’s twenty minutes on the grass with everyone reading their own thing and sharing favourite paragraphs. The form changes. The habit doesn’t.
On bookshelves
Access matters more than curation. Whether that’s a home library, a library card, an ebook app, or a combination of all three, the books need to be reachable, browsable, and slightly too many. We live without a local library so we’ve built ours at home, mixing reading levels deliberately so there’s always something slightly ahead of where they are, sitting there looking interesting on a higher shelf. (The higher shelf trick works at every age. There is something about a book that requires a step stool that makes it immediately more appealing.)
Books that are loved will be worn. Pages get bent. Spines get cracked. That’s fine — it means they’re being read. If there are books you don’t want touched unsupervised, put them higher up. The inaccessibility becomes its own form of intrigue.
On choice
Wherever possible, we let them choose. A curriculum might suggest a particular text but that suggestion isn’t binding, and a child who has chosen their own book is already halfway to engaged before they’ve opened it. We offer a shortlist — three books, all suitable, all different — and let the choice happen from there. Our eldest has been the household Librarian since he was about ten. It’s his job to recommend books to his younger siblings. This turns out to be one of the most effective reading encouragement tools we’ve accidentally stumbled on.
On where and how
Reading shouldn’t live only at the desk. Some books demand a blanket fort. Others are better horizontal in the garden. Audiobooks count, particularly for the child whose hands need to be doing something — the Lego-plus-audiobook combination saved our lockdown sanity and still features most weeks. To add a book to an activity is almost always a good choice.
The one rule we’ve settled on: you don’t leave the house without something to read. Everything else is negotiable.
